SLU Community “Walks to Madrid” for Second Straight Summer

SLU Walk to Madrid is a virtual team walking program developed by the departments of human resources and campus recreation. This year, Mission and Ministry staff assisted walkers by providing spiritual reflections via the weekly email update.

The Madrid Trotters

Eric Anderson, director of campus recreation, said that participation in the program once again exceeded expectations.

"We were thrilled to have another great turnout for this year's walking program," Anderson said. The momentum we built from last year's program really seemed to carry over to this year. The team concept is a great way to increase both motivation and accountability. And once again, we had teams from SLU's Madrid Campus join us."

Walkers received weekly health tips and information ranging from how to select walking shoes to sticking with their exercise program. Teams were also given the opportunity to double their steps each week by completing a bonus challenge such as hosting a healthy lunch with their team mates or submitting a SLU spirit team photo.

Each program participant tracked their steps with a pedometer, setting a daily goal of 10,000 steps (roughly five miles). Team captains collected the total weekly steps and submitted the count online.

"Pedometers are a great way to increase awareness of daily activity," said Anderson. "Most of us only take around 3,000-5,000 steps per day but the goal for Walk to Madrid was 10,000 steps. At 10,000 per day, participants can achieve the health benefits associated with physical activity."

Walk This Way

This year's program ran June 6-July 31. In those 56 days participants accumulated 562,150,818 steps (not including the weekly challenge bonus) or equivalent to 281,075 miles.

What do these big numbers mean? Basically, the average Walk to Madrid Participant accumulated 10,234 steps per day. This is great, since this was the goal of the program - to have participants accumulate 10,000 steps per day or about 5 miles of walking each day.

Participants in SLU's Walk to Madrid 10,000 steps program celebrated their accomplishments during an awards ceremony at the Simon Recreation Center on Wednesday, Aug. 10.

Ken Fleischmann, Vice President of Human Resources (who was also a participant in the program) handed out awards to the top 10 teams.